Archive for March, 2009

March 4th, 2009

I have an Amazon gift voucher burning a hole in my (virtual) pockets and I thought I would treat myself to a maths book. The problem is that I have around 200 potential candidates on my wish list – truly an embarrassment of choice. So much choice that I am stupefied by it – I have no idea what I should order.

So dear reader, help me out please. What would you suggest I get?

March 3rd, 2009

Regular readers will know that I like to find even the smallest excuse for a celebration and I usually look to recreational mathematics for inspiration.  Recent random celebrations include Unix time 1234567890, my Venusian Birthday and last year’s pi day (coming up again really soon by the way).

Well, thanks to a reminder from mathmom, I’ve just discovered that today is a square root day.  The next one wont be until 4th April 2016 – over 7 years away!  Seems like a good enough reason to celebrate to me :)

March 3rd, 2009

I recently made a few minor updates to my original Fortran NAG / Excel tutorial and so am making it available here. If anyone finds this useful or has any other detail to add then let me know.  I consider this to be an evolving document and will consider additions and modifications on request.

The tutorial assumes you are using the thread safe version of Mark 21 of the Fortran libraries – FLDLL214ML

Some people have questioned why I ever looked into this combination and my answer is simple – If you find yourself needing to do some serious numerical work with Microsoft Excel then (in my opinion at least) you are advised to hand over the numerical heavy lifting to something that is capable.  The NAG library is more than capable.

Click here to download the tutorial in pdf format.

March 2nd, 2009

From time to time I get sent someone’s thesis in the hope that I might be able to fix a Latex problem or two for them.  I was recently looking at someone’s code on a newish Ubuntu 8.10 machine and when I tried to compile it I received the following error

! LaTeX Error: File `setspace.sty’ not found.

The Ubuntu package I needed was texlive-latex-recommended which I installed using

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended

On trying to compile the code a second time I got the following error

! LaTeX Error: File `footmisc.sty’ not found.

which was fixed by

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra

These packages don’t just install footmisc.sty and setspace.sty for you – they install a whole host of Latex packages as well.